Nine days on a timetable that does not hold

The published crossing from Oban is five hours and forty minutes. Ours is eight, because we go the long way round the south of Barra to find water the vessel can work in, and for two of those hours the horizon does something I have not seen before, which is to disappear entirely into a grey that is the same above and below.

This is the fourth of November. In August this boat carries campervans and a queue that starts at the terminal door. Today there are nineteen foot passengers, four lorries, and a man from Stornoway who tells me, without my asking, that the winter timetable is a work of fiction and the sooner I understand that the better time I will have.

He is right, and he is not complaining. That distinction turns out to be the whole subject.

What closes

Most of it. The visitor centres shut at the end of September, and so do a majority of the cafés, the craft places, the bike hire and the two restaurants I had marked on a map in the summer expectation that a map means something. The hostel at the north end is closed. One of the two petrol stations on the island I spend the middle of the week on is closed on Sundays and closes at four on the other days.

What stays open is the shop, the pub attached to the hotel, the post office for three mornings a week, and — this is the part I had not expected — everything that exists for the people who live there. The community hall does a lunch on Wednesdays. There is a swimming pool. The library van has a schedule that is followed to the minute, which is more than can be said for the ferry it arrives on.

You are not visiting a closed version of the summer place. You are visiting the actual place, which the summer covers over.

The ferry problem, honestly

Between November and March the inter-island services run on a combination of timetable, weather and the state of a fleet that is old. In nine days I had two cancellations and one substitution onto a different route, which is not unusual and which the crews handle with a patience that suggests they do it constantly.

The practical consequence is that a nine-day trip cannot contain nine days of plans. It contains six, and three days of slack, and the slack is not wasted because it is where the trip actually happens. The morning I lost to a cancelled sailing is the morning I walked four miles up a road in horizontal rain and was given a lift back by a woman delivering bread, who wanted to know what on earth I thought I was doing and then talked for twenty minutes about her son in Glasgow.

Book accommodation with the cancellation understood in advance. Ask, when you book, what happens if the boat does not run. Everywhere I stayed had an answer to that question ready, because everybody who lives there has needed it.

Light

Sunrise on the west side in the second week of November is around eight and sunset around half past four, and the useful light — the light you can walk in without a torch — is nine to three. Six hours. It sounds meagre and it is not, because on a clear day the whole of it is the low golden hour that photographers chase for forty-five minutes in June. The machair goes the colour of a lion. The sea over the shell sand at Luskentyre stays turquoise in a way that looks falsified and is not.

On a bad day you get none of it and the wind takes the door out of your hand. There were three of those. I read a great deal.

What to bring that I did not

Proper waterproof trousers rather than the ones that are showerproof. A torch with a strap for your head, because the walk back from the pub is unlit and the road has no verge. Cash, in notes, in useful denominations. A paper map, because the phone signal on the east side of the hills is a rumour. And more books than you think, because the evenings begin at four.

Do not bring a schedule that requires the ferry to behave. Bring the ability to be somewhere for an extra day and not mind. Every visitor I met who was having a bad time was having it for that reason, and every one who was happy had arrived with the same piece of knowledge the man on the boat had tried to give me before we had even landed.